Pay special attention to the following areas. Use the entire time available to you for your exam. If you’re finished before the time, review your answers and again focus especially on the following:

1.Capitalise all nouns!
2.Use the perfect (=past) tense when you describe events that happened in the past. This feels like stating the obvious but you’d be surprised how many times people use the present tense for describing the past.
3.You can, however, use the present tense to describe what you’ll do in the future. Im Sommer fahre ich in den Urlaub.
4.Remember the differences between als, wenn and wann. All translate as the English “when” but als is used for past events (Als ich 10 Jahre alt war, war ich in Spanien.); wenn for future or regularly occuring events (Immer wenn ich Durst habe, trinke ich Wasser. Wenn ich wieder in Cork bin, besuche ich meine Eltern.); wann is only ever used in questions (Wann kommst du?)
5.Remember the word order. Generally the subject in a main sentence comes first followed by the verb. Ich fahre morgen nach Dublin. If you put anything else in the front the verb still remains at second place: Morgen fahre ich nach Dublin. (Not: Morgen ich fahre nach Dublin.)
6.If you’re in loss for a word, don’t beat yourself up over it but try and come up with alternatives that may also describe it. Brand names can often come in handy! “Ich brauche Panadol.” if you happened to forget that “die Tablette” is German for “tablet”. It’s better to write something rather than nothing.
7.Re-read the German exam texts properly to make sure you have really understood them correctly.

If you’re stuck:

Don’t just sit there with your head looking at the ceiling. Write. Anything. At all. If you have to: Doodle. It is scientifically proven that the movement of your pen will likely stir memories as a lot of the time you learned the language by writing it down.

Yes, some of these tips feel like stating the bleeding obvious but they often make a huge difference for the overall exam score. So take them to heart. Trust me: You’ll be kicking yourself black and blue if you end up making any of those errors.